Fostering love of good reading in the children & adults (& college students!) of Gracepoint Berkeley Church and Davis, Austin, Minneapolis, San Diego, Riverside, Hsinchu, Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Barbara, Seattle, DMV, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, North Carolina, Chicago, and BEYOND!

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I am excited to announce the 2017 Bibliopolis Summer Reading Challenge, which starts today, and ends September 1st. And yes, if you’re in the middle of a book right now, you may use it for the challenge.

Sorry to all the adults, this is a chapter book challenge for high school and younger only. I’m guessing the participants will be 2nd-12th graders, but if your K-1st grader wants to tackle it, they are welcome to, especially if you the parent want to read along with them.

There are 25 squares (of course you can read MORE!). You can choose what bingo line you want to start reading. You’ll get one raffle ticket per book, and one bonus ticket for every bingo line. So you don’t necessarily have to make bingo lines for this challenge.

Read the rules carefully, though. You can only use a book once on the board! I suggest doing it in pencil, so that you can move books around later if you need to. 🙂

For each book you read, you’ll fill out a book review. Below is a picture of it, but again, you can download your own copy of the Book Review form here.

You’ll want to put this somewhere safe. I would strongly suggest using a folder or binder for your entire challenge, as you’ll need to keep all of your book review forms together as well!

The book review doesn’t take too long, but do notice at the bottom it says that you will be asked to redo your book review if you do a shoddy job.

With their permission, I am featuring our youngest finishers and their mini-reviews. I hope you’ll be inspired to pick up some more books!

Julia (holding her favorite biography) celebrating her completed bookmark with two of her friends!

Hi, my name is Julia. I’m 9 years old and in 4th grade. The heroes of faith book I liked the most is about William Wilberforce. I liked that book the most because when he really starts to understand the true meaning of what it is like to be a Christian, lots of people are asking him to present a bill against slavery to Parliament. After like a week he finally decides that he will present the bill. He decided to do that because this guy named Thomas gave him a copy of his essay to read. After he read all those words he started studying slavery. He learned all of these crucial facts about what people were doing to slaves, and that is what led him to the point when he presented the bill to the others.

Throughout half of his life he fought for others to have their freedom even though people kept on rejecting the bill. He still persevered, he brought up the bill several times, and had lots of supporters too. He eventually succeeded and it became a law officially.

This inspired me because he was a really bad person before. He would never study and his tutor would make fun of him if he studied or went to church or even read the Bible, so William would just gamble away and drink a lot. But when he met his old friend Isaac, he turned into a Christian and wanted to help all slaves get their freedom. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

Wesley not only reads Heroes of Faith biographies, but plays baseball too. 🙂

Wesley is 8 years old and in 3rd grade. Here is his mini-review of his favorite book from the challenge:

My favorite Christian Heroes book I read is about Jacob Deshazer because he was stuck in jail for many years and then he told a lot of people about God in China. When he was in jail for many years, he got to read books and one of them was the Bible. He read it 15 times before he gave it to someone else. This is how he became a Christian. I also thought it was cool that he was part of the Doolittle Raiders who first attacked Japan with a B25 bomber.

Several lessons learned, the most important one being that when a challenge is too long, people lose momentum. I thought that having a longer time period to read the requisite books would translate to more people completing the challenge, but the opposite happened. Perhaps procrastination has something to do with it too!

Lesson #2 is that the hype man exists for a reason. I didn’t want to keep beating people on the head with the challenge, but because I didn’t hype it up everywhere I went, people kind of lost steam, and most just…forgot about it.

Don’t worry! I’ve learned and have some ideas for the summer reading challenge. So stay tuned!